


Transformative

by bricoleur10



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen, Team!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:52:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3635613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bricoleur10/pseuds/bricoleur10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A surrealist alternate reality thing in which some people have the ability to turn into animals and everything else is exactly the same except that Eliot’s one of those people who can change and it’s kind of a thing for him, telling the others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Transformative

\--

Transformative

\--

Eliot’s been able to change since the day he turned twelve years old. Even before that, though, he’d known there was something different inside of him. 

He could run faster than his friends; fall harder without getting hurt; he never cried, not even as a baby; and his grandpa had been one, too. 

His parents had always talked about it, made it an easy reality to accept so that when it happened he wouldn’t feel so alone. 

That first day, his twelfth birthday, he’d shifted into a hawk. 

It had felt like coming home. 

\--

Most shifters only have one, maybe two, animals they can become. 

For some people it’s so painful they only do it if they have to, or never.

Some people find they can transform once, and only once. In a situation where their life is in danger or the life of someone they love might end of they don’t change right then and there. After that one time they can never do it again. 

Others never get the hang of it, they change when their emotions are high and they have to be careful, scared, all their lives to never let it happen at the wrong time. 

People who can’t change, – the other ninety eight percent of the human race – some of them hate people who can. They’re afraid of them or think they’re evil. Those people are ignorant, and Eliot’s never had a very high tolerance for ignorance. 

\--

Eliot’s different. 

Even in the context of the abnormal he’s an irregularity. He doesn’t have one or two animals he can become at will. 

He has all of them. 

\--

That first day, his twelfth birthday, he shifts into a hawk and it feels like coming home. 

The very next day he turns himself into a horse. 

The day after that a bear. 

The next day a wolf. 

In a month he’s still shifting through everything he can be. He reads books to learn about animals that don’t exist in Oklahoma, and then he becomes those, too. 

His parents are scared for him and proud of him. 

Eliot understands the fear, but he’d never wrapped his head all the way around the pride. This isn’t something he’s accomplished; this is something he’d been born with. 

The difference between skill and luck.

\--

As a panther Eliot can kill someone in less than a second. As a human it can take him just as long, or a thousand times longer. 

He starts learning how to fight when he’s in high school. 

He joins the military because that’s what his daddy had done, and shifters are in high demand there. 

Eliot’s luck gets him a high rank way faster than he deserves it. 

His skill keeps him there for seven years. 

\--

He’s not ashamed of what he can do, and he’s never been scared of those who might want him dead for it. 

He never tells anybody about it because it’s none of their damn business anyway. 

By the time he gets out of the army he’s just so sick of being _different_. 

\--

Then he spends five years working for Moreau. 

He never tells the older man what he can do. Nor does he divulge the secret to anybody else on Moreau’s crew. 

He still stands out amongst those men, though. Without trying and without wanting. 

He’ll always be different. 

By the time he realizes that, he’s just sick of being evil. 

\--

He takes a sabbatical after leaving Moreau. 

He goes to India and shifts into a red fox. He’d meant to stay for a week, maybe two. 

He’s there for over a year. 

\--

Most people who can change can’t do it for long. After a few hours or a couple of days their animal bodies start feeling too small or too big, not right in all the wrong places. They itch to be human again. They crave two legs or land or higher brain functions or something else they just can’t get as an animal. 

Eliot’s never been like most people. 

His mind never leaves him when he changes. He’s the Eliot he’s always been, just inside a ferret or a cat or a shark. And he craves those other things sometimes, sure. The legs or the morals; the not-so-intense  
smells or processed foods. But it’s not the same kind of craving. 

Other shifters go crazy with want. 

Eliot can brush it off like a persistent itch or a memory he can’t quite place. 

He’s only ever met one other shifter who works the same way he does. Her name had been Santeria, and they’d stayed together six months before the power they had together started to scare them both. 

Eliot’s never been afraid of his own abilities, because he’d learned early on how to control them, but the power of them as one had been intense. A lack of inhibitions had been born, and people had died because of  
it. 

Folie à deux.

After half a year they’d agreed never to see each other again. 

It’s a shame, too, because Eliot had truly loved her. 

\--

He gets back into the game because he wants more than a life hiding. 

He takes jobs and hunts bad guys. He thinks sometimes that he’s making up for his sins, but he knows he’ll die long before he can cleanse his soul of all the wrong he’s done. He’s just making the best of what  
time he has left. 

He’ll do good and have fun. 

There’s nothing else out there for him better than that. 

\--

Then he meets Nate and Parker and Hardison. 

Then he meets Sophie.

Then they form the crew.

\--

He doesn’t tell them about what he can do for a long, long time. 

That first year he doesn’t even consider it. Not once. 

The second year he has the thought, once or twice, but it’s fleeting, born out of the beginnings of trust and a need for family, so he ignores it. 

The third year they’re together he considers it more. They’re solid by now. Stable. He trusts these people. He should be able to tell them. It’s just been a secret so long by then that he doesn’t know what the truth will turn them into. And he’s not sure he wants to find out. 

By the time that fourth year rolls around he’s stopped thinking about it. Stopped actively thinking about it, anyway. Nothing about the thought is active anymore. It’s just always, always there. Like the memories and his power. 

He changes all the time when he’s not around them. He craves it. 

He needs to run, to hunt, to see in the dark. To fly. 

No matter how many times he shifts it still always feels like coming home.

\--

It happens the way he always imagined it would. 

They’re in the middle of a con and it goes wrong. A worse kind of wrong than any kind of con before it has ever gone. Even when they’d fought Moreau nothing like this had happened, and Eliot hadn’t even considered shifting. Human Eliot is the only one Moreau had ever known, and battling him as anything less would have been cheating. 

But this isn’t Moreau.

This is five guys with guns in a car driving away. With Sophie. 

This is Nate frantic and Parker screaming. This is Hardison pleading. 

This is, “They’re going to kill her. Eliot. They’re going to _kill_ her.” 

This is a split second where nothing he’s ever done will mean anything if he doesn’t get to her in time. 

He doesn’t have a moment to debate it, and even if he did he wouldn’t need it.

\--

He starts running. He doesn’t even remember becoming the hawk. 

The window of the car is rolled down and he flies in, goes straight for the driver. His razor sharp beak gets one of his eyes before he’s a human again. 

The fight is bloody and complicated; he shifts back into human Eliot and suddenly there are so many bodies, too many limbs. The car had already been crowded, and he can feel Sophie’s terror even as a man fighting with fists. 

They all get hurt. Some of them before the car crashes, all of them after. 

None of the men live, but Sophie and Eliot do.

That’s all that matters. 

\--

He wakes up in Nate’s apartment. On the couch covered in a blanket. 

The first thing he’s aware of is the pain. The second thing is a person. Parker. 

She waits until his eyes are all the way open and he’s blinked a few times. Then she says, “You can fly.” 

It shouldn’t make him smile the way it does. 

It shouldn’t feel like coming home. 

\--

After they see him turn into the hawk they assume that that’s it. He’s a bird in his free time, easy as can be. It’s Nate who notices the glint in his eyes as they’re talking about it. 

The mastermind stops mid-sentence and asks, “What else can you change into, Eliot?” 

The others stop, too. 

Hardison snorts, “Another bird, maybe.” He shakes his head. “That’s the way shifters work. I’ve read up on this, I told you. There can’t be anything else.” 

Parker and Sophie are watching the hacker, but Nate’s still staring at him. “Eliot?” 

The hitter takes a deep breath. “Everything.” 

That’s the moment that changes them. 

\--

“A rat?” Parker inquires. 

Eliot nods.

“A moose?” 

“Yeah,” he grunts. This has been going on for three days by now. 

“A butterfly?” 

“I don’t do bugs.” 

“You can’t?” She looks almost disappointed. 

He shrugs. “Never tried.”

Her eyes stay bright. “Cool.”

\--

They talk about him behind closed doors. They whisper and stalk around. Hardison won’t leave his computer and Parker won’t stop listing possibilities. 

Eliot wants, for the first time in four years, to run away from them. 

\--

“I can leave.” He makes the offer to Nate one night, eyes downcast to his whiskey, pretending that he hadn’t heard the conversation they’d been having not an hour ago. “I know it’s...it’s a lot to deal with. Too much.” 

He can feel Nate looking, but he doesn’t look back. He wishes he were something different right now. A dog or a python, a lizard or an owl.

“Do you want to leave?” He boss asks calmly. Eliot can smell his fear. 

“I want things to go back to the way they were.” He says honestly. 

“I don’t...it’s not that easy.” 

Eliot snorts. 

“You opened up a lot of doors, by telling us about this.” His words are too careful. 

“Didn’t exactly tell you, Nate,” he points out. “Spent four years not telling you, actually. And this is why.” 

“What’s why?” Their mastermind asks, genuinely perplexed. 

“A lot of doors?” He repeats with a small chuckle. “You’re gonna start plannin’ jobs around this. Figuring out how you can _use_ it, and I just...that’s why I never told Moreau, y’know? Why I never tell anybody.”

“You have a gift.” Nate states plainly, like it’s an easily seen truth. 

“I have a weapon.” The hitter corrects. 

“You can do things...no one else. No one else can do. It’s a gift.” 

“A weapon.” Eliot says again with a bite. His whiskey blurs and he wishes more than anything that he could bring himself to look up. “It’s a weapon, Nate, but it’s _mine_.” 

The mastermind doesn’t ask for clarification. “Yours.” 

“I didn’t ask for this, man, but...but I aint givin’ it back and I’m sure as hell not givin’ it away.” He finally does meet the older man’s eyes. Because in this moment he can’t not. “Never...you can’t ever have this, Nate.” 

He swallows and nods. “Oh.” 

“So...I can leave if you want.”

“It is a lot to deal with,” he says the words that Eliot had started this with, and even though only a few minutes have gone by since then, the hitter feels like the whole world had shifted and he’s stuck in a freefall. 

“Yeah.” 

“I think we can handle it, though.” Nate says it calm and almost easy. “As a team. We can deal.” 

Eliot takes a deep breath and almost smiles. “I was kinda hopin’ you’d say that.” 

\-- 

Coming home feels a lot like landing. 

\--

End


End file.
